Scripts and Scaling In Online Games

CowboyRobot writes "Jim Waldo of Sun Microsystems has written an article titled Scaling In Games & Virtual Worlds, saying that they 'should be perfect vehicles to show the performance gains possible with multicore chips and groups of cooperating servers. Games and virtual worlds are embarrassingly parallel, in that most of what goes on in them is independent of the other things that are happening. Of the hundreds of thousands of players who are active in World of Warcraft at any one time, only a very small number will be interacting with any particular player.' A group of researchers at Cornell wrote a related piece about improving game development and performance through better scripting."

Comments

Re:The Universe is a game...

[ultranova]

You can tell its scripting is feature complete because the nerds have gone out and written virtual computers that run on top of the game.

Actually you can't. Your brains are also operating within the Universe, and thus bound by any limitation it might have; thus, if there's some important aspect of logic or computability which the Universe lacks, you couldn't conceive it existing, and thus you would mistakenly consider the Universe feature complete.

All that can be said is that the laws of logic within the Universe allow the computation of everything they allow, which is a tautological non-statement.